Literary Journal #4: Profiles

Below, the editors of Profiles tell us a little about the magazine, and you can read an extract!

Profiles is an independent literary and visual-arts journal dedicated to character studies and portraiture, edited by Clare Healy and Sarah Sturzel and published in Dublin since 2022. Previous issues have featured writing by William Keohane, Claire-Lise Kieffer and David Butler, and artworks by Zurich Portrait Prize winners Salvatore of Lucan and David Stephenson. In The Irish Times, Kevin Power writes, ‘Profiles is the real deal: the art and design are spectacular, and the fiction is unusually good.’

The writing and artwork we publish spans a variety of styles and genres but is principally concerned with stories and portraiture that reveal something about the human condition. We love works of fiction and non-fiction that treat their subjects with empathy and nuance. In Books Ireland Magazine, Eoghan Smith writes, ‘One suspects that the editors do not choose simply the best contributions that land in the journal’s inbox, but those works of excellence which will attain greater meaning from being placed in context alongside other pieces of visual or literary art. This is one of the most remarkable aspects of the journal, because while the portraits in Profiles tend to be of one or two people, what we experience in its totality is a portrait of the human character, in all its messy complications.’

Each issue consists of a combination of commissioned works and works received via our annual call for submissions. Commissioned writers and artists pair up to produce complementary pieces, with the artist creating a portrait based on the writer’s story or vice versa.

Our annual Profiles radio show, broadcast on Dublin Digital Radio and produced by Ruaidhrí Kiersey, features readings by and interviews with our contributors, as well as commissioned musical compositions inspired by their work.

We are grateful to receive funding from Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin City Council and the Arts Council of Ireland in 2026, which allows us to pay all of our contributors in line with our payment policy.

Our next issue (Issue 5) is forthcoming in November 2026 and submissions reopen in early 2027. You can subscribe via our website and check out our back issues on our e-shop or at one of our many stockists in Ireland, the UK and Belgium.

 

Extract: ‘Village Exile, Basilicata Diary’ by Michela Esposito

Thursday, 19^th of August

Cemetery this morning. Nonna salutes everyone as we walk down the hill. We touch the black iron gates as we enter, a ritual to ward off an early entry into those grounds. Can’t decide if the standing tombs are concrete and dismal, or faded and beautiful. Nonno’s grave has a rose tree with small yellow flowers, and a candle that is still burning from last Sunday. Nonna cleans the stone with a cloth, washes the path in front of it, prunes the flowers that are dried up in the sun, and lights another candle that we bought in the shop down below, rather than the one near the house, because they sell them for 40 cents cheaper. Warns me not to tell anyone we went to the other shop for the candle. I hold her handbag as she says her prayers in a low chant, and as we stand there we are eaten alive by mosquitoes who are sent into a frenzy by the presence of living flesh. Vincenzo the caretaker asks Nonna why my face is so serious – in a cemetery. The mosquitoes land on his head as he speaks.

On the walk back up the hill she says we need to stop at the house of a Nonnina, an older-older woman, for pears from her garden that are hanging over the high wall on the Via Roma. These uncollected pears have been tormenting Nonna for two weeks. Nonna shouts ‘Ninella’ at the house until a tiny woman, all in black, appears at the door. We talk in a sitting room covered in relics, and she tells me of her year in Edinburgh with her husband, that she went wherever he wanted to go ‘from day one.’ Rehearses one or two lines in English and I say well done, feeling uneasy, sticking to Italian. Nonna interrupts, says: ‘Can we collect some pears?’ Ninella: ‘Pears?’ Nonna: ‘The pears on your land.’ And the other woman bristles and realises what we came for. We are led into the back garden, where two shepherd’s crooks are magically conjured from out of nowhere. Ninella opens a heavy black gate with the bunch of keys at her waist and we go down, down, over broken stones, weeds, ducking under vines that hang like traps from abandoned trellises. The pear tree is at the back of a field of long grass, in between two leafy fig trees that give off a sickly perfume. The trees are heavy with overripe fruit and swarming with wasps. I’m instructed to hold the bags open while the widows hook and pull the branches and pluck every pear within reach (as ‘a city child’ I’m not trusted with the tools and have to watch, shamefaced, while my 73-year-old Nonna and the 90-year-old Nonnina heave these tools up over their heads). The mosquitoes suck at the backs of my hands, my wrists. Nonna fills one bag with pears and then turns on the sentinel fig trees, carefully swaddling the fruit in their own leaves, like infants. Regrets the branches that are too high up to reach. Back at the house, Nonna disappears into the kitchen to divide the fruit evenly, some for Ninella and some for us. I’m left in the back with the older woman and she sees this as an advantage and says, in English, that it’s not right. If she had asked us to collect the fruit, then yes, but like this, no. ‘Your Nonna is insatiable.’ We leave, Nonna turns around to say thanks again and again. The bags are like lead in my hands. ​​​​I say nothing about what Ninella said, although it stays with me all the rest of the day.